Eugene McCarraher

Love Is Stronger than Debt

If the last five years of American politics have demonstrated anything, it's that Marx's dictum about the modern state couldn't be more indisputable: our government is the executive committee for the common affairs of the bourgeoisie. Now more than ever, our liberal democracy is a corporate franchise, and the stockholders are demanding an ever-higher return on their investment in America, Inc. Over the last four decades, the Plutocracy has decided to repeal the 20th century, to cancel the gains and protections won by workers, the poor, and others outside the imperial aristocracy of capital. Enough of this coddling of those Ayn Rand vilified as "moochers" and "looters." Return the country to its rightful owners: the "Job Creators," the Almighty Entrepreneurs, those anointed by Heaven to control the property interests of the American Empire. Endowed with the Divine Right of Capital, they deserve our thanksgiving and reverence, for without them we would not deserve to live, such common clay are we.

Lest anyone think that the re-election of President Barack Obama invalidates this judgment, think again. Mitt Romney may have been a more egregious and openly disdainful lord of the manor, but Obama has compiled an impeccable record of imperial corporate stewardship. Despite all the hype about a rising progressive coalition of non-whites and young people, there is no reason to believe that Obama's second term of office will be any less a model of deference.

The Plutocracy's beatific vision for the mass of Americans is wage servitude: a fearful, ever-busy, and cheerfully abject pool of human resources. Rendered lazy and recalcitrant by a half-century of mooching, American workers must be forced to be free: crush labor unions, keep remuneration low, cut benefits and lengthen working hours, close or narrow every avenue of escape or repose from accumulation. If they insist on living like something more than the whining, expendable widgets they are, reduce them to a state of debt peonage with an ensemble of financial shackles: mortgages, credit cards, and student loans, all designed to ensure that the wage slaves utter two words siren-sweet to business: "Yes, boss." It's the latest chapter in the depressing story that David Graeber relates in Debt: debt as an especially insidious weapon in the arsenal of social control. "There's no better way to justify relations founded on violence … than by reframing them in the language of debt," he writes, "because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong."

Alas, we're living in the early, bewildering days of the demise of the American Empire, the beginning of the end of that obsession-compulsion known as the Amerian Dream. The reasons are clear, if often angrily denied: military hubris and over-extension; a stagnant monopoly capitalism with a bloated financial sector; a population on whom it's dawning that low-wage labor is their inexorable fate; ecological wreckage that can only be limited or repaired by cessation of growth. The patricians' task will be threefold: finessing the increasingly obvious fact of irreversible imperial decline; convincingly performing the charade of democracy in the face of popular vassalage; and distracting or repressing the roiling rage and tumult among the plebs. How will the elites maintain and festoon their ever-more untenable hegemony?

Empires have always evaded but eventually accepted their impending senescence: first, willful, vehement denial, and redoubled, often violent devotion to the imperial customs and divinities; then the slow, entropic apocalypse of demoralization and retrenchment. As imperial twilight descends, a brisk if melancholy market of fashions in acquiescence will undoubtedly arise. Reconciled to the dystopian prospect of a world engulfed in war and famine, the affluent will sport a variety of brands of what Simon Critchley dubs "passive nihilism," a withdrawal from politics into tasteful, well-guarded enclaves of resignation. Radical visions may revive as well, but right now they're dispiritingly feckless. Looking at first like a pentecost of utopia, the "Occupy" movement has dismally failed to gain any popular traction, in part because of the utter mediocrity and incoherence of its demands. "Fairness" is populist pabulum; "we are the 99%" is a slogan, not serious political analysis. The injustice and indignity of capitalism have seldom been so openly wretched, but as Graeber ruefully observes, just when we need "to start thinking on a breadth and with a grandeur appropriate to the times," we seem to have "hit the wall in terms of our collective imagination."

The US has not practiced capitalism since 1929. FDR moved the nation as close to pure socialism as was possible without creating a dictatorship. The harvest of that socialism was the stagflation of the 1970's. Carter managed to role back socialism enough to jump start the economy again, but since then we have piled on 3 million pages of new regulations in the Federal Register. Today the US is only slightly less socialist than the most socialist nations of Europe. The more that socialism fails, the more socialists blame capitalism. We are following in the path of the old USSR. We have less wisdom than the Chinese who, after starving to death 30 million Chinese abandoned socialism. rdmckinney.blogspot.com

Gene McCarraher

May 15, 201312:41pm

Matt -- As someone who works TWELVE months a year and who has never considered himself perched anywhere else than among "the rest of humanity," I can tell you that Benkarkis simply restates the shallow, boring boilerplate of Tea Party reactionaries and other market fundamentalists. I know quite well how "the rest of humanity" lives: I grew up in a working-class family (made comfortable by my father's membership in a union, something Benkarkis and his ilk no doubt consider vessels of creeping communism) and while I was in graduate school and for a time afterward I worked at any number of low-wage jobs. So I can present my battered diploma from the School of Hard Knocks as readily as any other spokesperson for "the rest of us." Please, critics, enough populist drivel about Hard Work and Regular Folks.

Matt

May 12, 20139:05pm

Thank you for the article and the comments. It will take time to digest, but the process will most certainly be nourishing. As part of that process, I would like to ask Benkarkist, of the previous post, a question:
As someone who is, myself, outside the "Liberal Arts Ivory Tower", is working for "a real wage" in the private sector and is currently between the age of 22 and 30, I am genuinely curious to know what you suggest the author would find if he were to do as you say and "come down from the perch and join the rest of humanity". What am I missing here from my perch set squarely among "the rest of humanity" that would lead me to question the conclusions of this well-reasoned, well-researched and well-written article?

Benkarkis

May 11, 20137:59pm

All I can say is come out of the Liberal Arts Ivory Tower and come to the real world. The first step should be to force all Humanities Professors to work for a real wage from age 22 to 30. And to donate their tenure and 7 month work years to the rest of us. Please come down from the perch and join the rest of humanity.

M.M. Year

May 08, 20139:59am

Thank you, CT and BC for having the courage to publish something that breaks from and challenges the political and economic orthodoxy that passes for (or rather surpasses in importance) Christian orthodoxy in American these days. Agree or disagree, McCarraher forces us to confront prevalent assumptions (that to be Christian = to be a modern capitalist, Republican, or any number of ahistoric litmus tests) and turn back to search those uncomfortable Scriptures and the final Word, Jesus.
I'll be looking for McCarraher's book and resubscribing to your print version.

Steve Zelt

May 07, 20135:28pm

If nothing else, McCarraher should win some kind of award for his sheer power with the written word. Please print whatever else this guy has to say. That was a hell of thing.

Clark Coleman

May 07, 20135:03pm

"The Plutocracy's beatific vision for the mass of Americans is wage servitude: a fearful, ever-busy, and cheerfully abject pool of human resources. Rendered lazy and recalcitrant by a half-century of mooching, American workers must be forced to be free: crush labor unions, keep remuneration low, cut benefits and lengthen working hours, close or narrow every avenue of escape or repose from accumulation." Yes, the Plutocrats have a plan to keep wages and benefits low. A big part of that plan is increased immigration, amnesty for illegal immigrants, failing to tighten border enforcement, lobbying against every plan to increase workplace enforcement, increasing the number of immigrants in every job category that they can plausibly whine about (from high tech skilled jobs to seasonal jobs to agricultural jobs to construction and just about everything else). And who supports them in their efforts? "Liberals" and "progressives." You know, the champions of the "oppressed," like the author.

eirenetheou

May 02, 20132:33pm

i have not seen this much truth-telling in print in one place in a long time.
God's Peace to you.
d

rick

April 30, 20133:10pm

Well, at least you are popular with the atheists! "To be a Christian is to be a communist!" You are such a comic professor! Worked well for Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Un, Ceausescu. My debt has been paid, my treasures are laid up in Heaven, the Holy Spirit is the down payment, the People's Republic of Heaven is not run by the proletariat, it is a Kingdom. Thanks for an amusing essay. And CT, what can I say?

Ryan Shaw

April 30, 20133:06pm

I have been a subscriber of Books & Culture for a number of years and I have to say, this is the most provocative, powerful, and prophetic article I have ever read in these pages. Nearly anywhere actually. I see why the editors chose to emblazen the cover with a direct quote.